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Matt Mihaly, CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment, which makes text-based MMOs like the highly entertaining Achaea, has an interview with Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges up on his blog. While there’s not much there we didn’t already know, there is an interesting passage in which Corey talks about how the platform — which is designed to provide a universal portal to games created with Multiverse — will bring “the right game to the right player.”

That’s absolutely, hands-down critical. Otherwise, only the top couple dozen games will ever be seen. There are many ways to do this. When a consumer launches the client, they go to the network login screen. . . . As you log in, for example, you could see a message saying “Oh, you play games X, Y, and Z. People who play those games also play game A.” There will also be taxonomies (categorized lists, a la Yahoo) of the worlds on our network, as well as search engines. We’ll also have at least one virtual world that functions as a hub–-The Nexus we’ll call it–-for finding other worlds. You can meet your friends there, and talk to an NPC who asks you what sort of experience you’d like. It will eventually point you through a portal. Jump your avatar through the portal, and you’ll go to that particular game. Part of the “long tail” notion is not just the democratization of creation, but also the democratization of distribution.

Nice stuff. For more interesting tidbits about Corey’s recent experience at the Firefly fan convention and how Multiverse fits with the long tail, read the rest of the interview.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in blogging the many events that have been taking place on Pontiac’s Motorati sims in the virtual world of Second Life, where it seems some cool stuff has been going on. The latest was a Monster Truck Rally that took place last night (and continues this evening) as part of the Motorlympics, whose champion will be crowned on Friday. The great thing about this stuff is that it looks like fun. Pontiac and virtual-world services shop Millions of Us seem to have found a great way to merge their promotional initiative with native SL culture. The other nice thing about it is that the Motorati Life Web site is chock full of information, including a directory, a blog,l forusm and more. Here’s hoping for more such integrated events in future.

After this recent post flagging tonight’s appearance in Second Life by Robert Randolph and O.A.R.’s Marc Roberge (at 5:00pm SL time), a couple of people dropped me a line asking for more details — which can be found below. Also want to note, though, that this event looks to be generating an interesting televisual moment. NBC will apparently air some brief footage of Second Life (see video above, though I’m not sure whether that’s what will end up on air) as a way to drive people to VirtualNBC.com, a Web portal where people without SL accounts can experience and participate in the event. (more…)